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Intel to Release its First Dedicated GPU In 2020, Next Playstation to Have AMD SoC Inside, and New Xbox and Hololens Stories

Intel had been rumored to ship its own dedicated graphics cards to compete with AMD and Nvidia, and both Intel CEO Brian Krzanich and Raja Koduri confirmed the plan, which will bring the first Intel discrete graphics chips in 2020.

?Intel?s first discrete GPU coming in 2020,? the company said in a terse Tweet on Tuesday morning.

Analyst Ryan Shrout wrote about it at MarketWatch, detailing a recent analyst meeting at which Intel CEO Brian Krzanich informed attendees that Intel will release its first discrete graphics chips in 2020, followed by an entire series of GPUs targeted at gaming, Artificial Intelligence and data center industries.

Intel recently hired Jim Keller, who spearheaded development of Apple's A4 and A5 processors and was the architect behind AMD's Zen microarchitecture. Following that, Intel hired former AMD global marketing head Chris Hook to head up its first marketing division devoted to discrete graphics.

Intel also poached AMD's graphics head Raja Koduri late 2017.

Seperately, there are reports that AMD is developing its 7nm Navi graphics architecture for Sony's Playstation 5, which is also said to use processors based on AMD's Zen+ core.

It would be interesting to see whether the next Xbox devices -- code-named "Scarlett" -- will use an semi-custom, AMD solution incorporating Vega, or something else. The current Xbox One X using a custom SoC from AMD.

Speaking of Microsoft, internal documents outlining Microsoft's future hardware plans have leaked, giving a sneak peek at what the next couple of years of the company's hardware are likely to look like, according to Brad Sams of Thurrott.com.

According to the report, there's a trio of Surface-branded devices with the code names Carmel, Libra, and Andromeda. Libra is the cheap Surface tablet that Bloomberg reported in May.

Carmel is the next iteration of the Surface Pro, featuring new Intel "Whiskey Lake" and "Amber Lake" processors. The Whiskey Lake CPUs will consume about 15W, while the Amber Lake chips will be rated at about 4.5W.

Andromeda is said to be Microsoft's portable, two-screen, hand-held device, due for release in 2018. The question here is whether such a new concept design will be appealing.

Next up, in 2019, is a new version of HoloLens, codenamed Sydney. The documents say it is due to hit the market in the first quarter of 2019. It will be much cheaper than the current HoloLens, as well as lighter, more comfortable, and with a much better display. It will probably use a new sensor package derived from the Project Kinect for Azure and also Microsoft's second-generation holographic processing unit custom processor.